Above: Coming soon: BAD APPLES, a dark comedy featuring Saoirse Ronan as a teacher pushed to the brink.
💥 Forget Toy Story 5 — 'The Trojan Teddy Bear' highlights “the promise and peril” of childhood in the age of AI. (NPR)
💥 Don’t sleep on Capital B’s education reporter Alecia Taylor, whose most recent piece is about an HBCU hazing lawsuit.
💥 Oh, great. AI companies like are racing to sign up K-12 teachers now, too. Journalists next? Or did I miss that already?
Here’s the Friday newsletter, ICYMI: Techlash summer, an Algebra Apocalypse, & one reporter’s first-year sizzle reel: 🏆 Best Education Journalism of the Week 🏆 (7/10/2026)
Friday’s secret bonus section for paid subscribers, revealed to all:
STUDENT VOICES: “Education journalism is always better when it is elevated by student voices,” says Firsthand editor Karina Elwood (above) in a new interview. “No matter whether that’s in your own reporting or helping other students do the work.”
BABY VS BATHWATER: “I am very sorry, but you cannot all be the baby,” says Amplify’s Dan Meyer in a recent Substack that asks the ed-tech question who’s the baby and who’s the bathwater.
As you may recall, Dan and I discussed the baby/bathwater question in our recent conversation. “Kids are social beings and they learn by talking to each other and with teachers,” says Meyer. “That’s the baby.”
Thanks to Meyer for mentioning The Grade in his column, and also to Jenny Anderson for highlighting our discussion about the “blunt, heavy-handed, and late” edtech critique from parents in a recent roundup.
Journalism quotes
“Those of us still working in media and journalism have to work that much harder to show that we are still relevant.”
“Getting out of the way is important, and it contributed to building some of the trust journalism still has. But these days, it’s not enough.”
“I don’t like it myself, and so I don’t want to do it.”
“Produced using AI, based on original work by Lauren Costantino.”
LONGFORM: The best essays, columns, and Substacks of the week:
A Test Isn’t Racist. (NYT/ McWhorter)
Can the Classroom Ever Be Automated? (MIT / Audrey Watters)
Jonathan Haidt is wrong about age-gating the internet (The Argument / Kelsey Piper)
The Private-School Tax Credit Is a Public-School Fundraising Machine. (BSed)
Proving Classroom Screen Time Is Worth It (EdWeek MarketBrief)
The power of a name (The Future is Bilingual / Tara Garcia Mathewson)
Is This What a Post-Literate Era Looks Like? (David W-W / NYT)
LAST BUT NOT LEAST: I want to write about schools and journalism in the ecstatic way Men In Blazers’ Roger Bennett talks about soccer. Or at least, I want to read someone else who does.
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